Introduction

Summary

The essays in this collection were almost all written within the past decade and deal with a range of questions, here brought under the headings ‘Mind’, ‘Action’, ‘Ethics’ and ‘Language’. In reality there is so much interconnection and overlap among the themes addressed that this fourfold division is more aesthetic than taxonomic. But it seemed preferable to a dry chronological ordering.

Many of the essays discuss or elaborate on the ideas of Elizabeth Anscombe, and a number discuss or elaborate on those of her friend and teacher Wittgenstein. Both philosophers have sometimes been lumped in with other representatives of something called ‘linguistic philosophy’, or alternatively ‘ordinary language philosophy’. Lazy classifications aside, it is certainly true that the philosophical work of these two thinkers is characterized by an awareness of that tendency to succumb to confusions and pictures (especially of what must be the case) which arises out of our intimate and therefore squinting perspective on the workings of our language.

Anscombe’s philosophy is explicitly wide-ranging, Wittgenstein’s implicitly so – in the sense that he opened up a large arena of potential philosophical investigation. This isn’t to say that the problems he explicitly deals with don’t cover a lot of ground, for these include problems in philosophy of mind, language, logic, mathematics and epistemology – a broad enough sweep. But out of what he wrote and said many paths lead, and these paths were followed after his death into areas he himself never approached, or into which he ventured only a little way. Anscombe was one of the philosophers to go down some of those paths, as well as exploring the paths off those paths and the paths off those. Her writings on intention and action clearly show the influence of her teacher, picking up some of his discussions where he left off. The same is true of her work in ethics, if only because of the central importance for ethics of intention and action; and this is something worth pointing out, given the great dissimilarity between Anscombe’s moral philosophy and Wittgenstein’s (such as it is). Here we have an illustration of the ‘implicit’ philosophical range of Wittgenstein’s work to which I’ve referred.